A typical SAS system consists of several basic components, including initiators, targets, and expanders. The expanders, akin to a network switch, are used to facilitate communications between multiple initiators and targets. The targets can be SAS disks or inexpensive SATA drives. Accordingly, in addition to the Serial SCSI Protocol (SSP) for supporting SAS disk drives and Serial Management Protocol (SMP) for managing SAS expanders, a third transport protocol, namely, Serial ATA Tunneling Protocol (STP) is also used for supporting SATA disks. However, there are a couple of connectivity issues with STP and SATA drives in a SAS domain. For example, SAS supports multiple initiators, while SATA drives only permit single-user access. In order to provide the multi-initiator capability with respect to SATA drives in a SAS domain, multiple affiliations need to be created within a SAS expander for controlling access to the SATA drives. This inevitably adds technical complexity and implementation cost in building SAS expanders. In addition, STP is a half-duplex protocol with inefficient data connections, especially in view of the multi-path I/O capability provided in the SAS domain. Such inefficiency can cause bottlenecks in data transport and reduce the overall performance of the SAS domain. Therefore, there is a need to bridge between these two different protocols of SAS and SATA so as to better integrate SATA drives into a SAS domain and enhance the overall performance of a SAS-supported computer storage network.